Yeah, he's a luddite. Though in his defense I do sympathize with a related sentiment - while it's great when people offer free stuff, it's bad when people demand to be given stuff for free. This dries up the incentives to create high-quality products and services, and the people end up with free stuff worth exactly what they paid for them.

I never understood as a kid, why everybody wanted to work so badly. It seemed so much more attractive to just play all day.

Maybe we should, as a global society, rethink some stuff from the ground up, and talk to children in the process, they might have some good ideas

Or just invite me on literally every project in the community. Everyone who works with me pretty much says it's like working with a 12 year old. Wait...

I never understood as a kid, why everybody wanted to work so badly. It seemed so much more attractive to just play all day.Maybe we should, as a global society, rethink some stuff from the ground up, and talk to children in the process, they might have some good ideas

Cameron Garnham: Open transactions project has a marketing problem. I don't get what it is useful for, and I didn't understand that after the presentation. I unfedstood that with their technology you can currently issue centralized "tokens". The vision is de-centralized, however I don't understand how that could be achieved. And generally I don't really understand what the open-transactions project is practically useful for. More practical examples, please!

If I understood it correctly, it is a common protocol for issuing centralized tokens for anything. The idea is that people can exchange different tokens, from different issuers, digitally, using the same protocol.I also don't know much about Open Transaction, I would need to learn more. I wonder if with alternative chains and merged mining we couldn't actually completely decentralize the double-spend verification part of the Open Transaction protocol, making it less centralized. It is inherently centralized anyway, since we're talking about token issuers.

Now, that's the thing that I really learned at the Bitcoin Conference. Now, I guess I got a little bit confused by a lot of the trolls and propaganda out there who don't understand, because, a lot of shreekers, who actually haven't used bitcoin. Now I assumed, like they, at a certain point, you know, people are like: 'it's a ponzy scheme!'. But what it is: it's a unit of transaction. If you've actually ever used it, you can see the simplicity of using it just to friggin' purchase something, not to speculate and hope to flip it to somebody at a greater price. You just convert your currency that day to whatever... there's some place that'll convert it to gold for you, you can convert it to euros, swiss franks, dollars, whatever you want.

(I sense the marketing direction will be less about bitcoin as money (enemy: USD) and more about bitcoin as a payment system (enemy: paypal))

Now, that's the thing that I really learned at the Bitcoin Conference. Now, I guess I got a little bit confused by a lot of the trolls and propaganda out there who don't understand, because, a lot of shreekers, who actually haven't used bitcoin. Now I assumed, like they, at a certain point, you know, people are like: 'it's a ponzy scheme!'. But what it is: it's a unit of transaction. If you've actually ever used it, you can see the simplicity of using it just to friggin' purchase something, not to speculate and hope to flip it to somebody at a greater price. You just convert your currency that day to whatever... there's some place that'll convert it to gold for you, you can convert it to euros, swiss franks, dollars, whatever you want.

(I sense the marketing direction will be less about bitcoin as money (enemy: USD) and more about bitcoin as a payment system (enemy: paypal))

exactly. forget trying to explain what it is or how it works. just show someone how to use it! ask what kind of phone they have, and then set them up with a wallet. send them one bitcoin, and show them how to send it back to you.

(I sense the marketing direction will be less about bitcoin as money (enemy: USD) and more about bitcoin as a payment system (enemy: paypal))

very true. Bitcoin is not a threat to the dollar. Bitcoin is a threat to the Banks and their stupid fees!

<sarcasm>The bank is dead. Long live the new bank!</sarcasm>

As I've said before, Bitcoin can only be a threat to banks if it is a threat to the dollar. If not, then whatever service is used to store a dollar balance and convert it to bitcoins and back for every transaction, is in fact the new bank and will suffer from all the problems of existing banks.

I don't disagree with the principle though, widespread adoption of Bitcoin will probably start with using it as a payment mechanism while only holding a small amount of it at any given time.